“What have you done?” cried the princess. “You have killed the holy woman!”
“No,” said Aladdin, “it is not Fatima I have killed,” and he told her how she had been deceived.
So it was that Aladdin was saved from the two wicked brothers. Some years later, the sultan died at a great age. As he left no sons, Princess Badr al-Budur succeeded him, and shared her power with Aladdin. They reigned together for many years and left behind them a brilliant succession.
Epilogue
“Majesty,” said Shahrazad as she finished the tale of the wonderful lamp, “you will have recognized in the Maghrebi magician the mark of a disturbed mind, a man gripped by the mania of wanting things, whose foul methods led him to great riches only to take them away from him, for he showed himself unworthy of them. In Aladdin, on the other hand, you will have seen a man who, though born to a humble home, rose to be king thanks to the same riches, which he acquired without having sought them, and which flowed to him in proportion with his need and his desire.
As for the figure of the sultan, you will have learned from him how even the fairest of monarchs courts danger, and risks even losing his crown, if he dares to act against natural justice, and if intemperate haste moves him to condemn an innocent man to death before giving him his say. You will, in the end, have recoiled from the crimes of the two brothers: one of them paid for his love of gold with his life; the other lost his life and his religion to avenge that villain, and, like him, reaped the reward of his wickedness.”
The sultan expressed to Shahrazad, his wife, his great delight at the marvelous workings of the lamp, and the pleasure he took from the stories she told him night after night, for they were enchanting, and almost always underpinned by a useful moral. He could see how deftly Shahrazad spun them one after the other, and did not take exception to these devices, for they allowed him to defer the promise he had so solemnly made, which was to keep each wife for one night only and put her to death in the morning. His only concern, in fact, was that her well of stories appeared to have run dry.
For this reason, having heard the end of the tale of Aladdin and Badr al-Budur, which was quite unlike anything he had heard before, he did not wait for Dunyazad and woke his wife himself as soon as morning broke, and asked her if she had reached the end of her tales.
“The end of my tales!” said Shahrazad. “I am far from it. Their number is so great that even I would be quite incapable of counting them. My only fear is that Your Majesty should tire of my voice before I have told them all.”
“Banish your fears,” said the sultan, “and if you will, tell me another one.”
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Galland, Antoine, trans. Les mille et une nuits: Contes arabes, 3 vols. Edited by Jean-Paul Sermain, with an introduction by Aboubakr Chraïbi. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2004.
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Translation copyright © 2019 by Yasmine Seale
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